Jeremy Bernstein | |
---|---|
Born | Rochester, New York, U.S. | December 31, 1929
Alma mater | Harvard University (Ph.D.) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics, mathematics |
Doctoral advisor | Julian Schwinger |
Jeremy Bernstein (born December 31, 1929) is an American theoretical physicist and popular science writer.
Bernstein's parents, Philip S. Bernstein, a Reform rabbi, and Sophie Rubin Bernstein named him after the biblical Jeremiah, the subject of his father's masters thesis. Philip's parents were immigrants from Lithuania, while Sophie was of Russian-Jewish descent. The family moved from Rochester to New York City during World War II, when his father became head of all the Jewish chaplains in the armed forces. [1]
Bernstein studied at Harvard University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1951, his master's in 1953, and his Ph.D. in 1955, on electromagnetic properties of deuterium, under Julian Schwinger. As a theoretical physicist, he worked on elementary particle physics and cosmology. A summer spent in Los Alamos led to a position at the Institute for Advanced Study. [2] In 1962 he became a faculty member at New York University, moving to become a professor of Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in 1967, a position that he continues to hold as professor emeritus. [3] He has held adjunct or visiting positions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Oxford, the University of Islamabad, and the Ecole Polytechnique. [4]
Bernstein was involved in Project Orion, investigating the potential for nuclear pulse propulsion for use in space travel. [5]
Bernstein is a popular science writer and profiler of scientists. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1961 to 1995, authoring scores of articles. [6] He has also written regularly for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books , and Scientific American , among others. Bernstein's biographical profiles of physicists, including Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein, John Stewart Bell and others, are able to draw on the experiences of personal acquaintance. [3] [4] In 2018, Bernstein published A Bouquet of Dyson: and Other Reflections on Science and Scientists. [7]
Freeman John Dyson was a British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. He was professor emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.
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Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an English mathematical and theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for both quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University, and a 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient.
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and in particle physics, for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.
John Stewart Bell FRS was a physicist from Northern Ireland and the originator of Bell's theorem, an important theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden-variable theories.
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The bottom quark, beauty quark, or b quark, is an elementary particle of the third generation. It is a heavy quark with a charge of −1/3 e.
Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Harvard University, and is a member of the board of sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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Quantum mechanics is the study of matter and its interactions with energy on the scale of atomic and subatomic particles. By contrast, classical physics explains matter and energy only on a scale familiar to human experience, including the behavior of astronomical bodies such as the moon. Classical physics is still used in much of modern science and technology. However, towards the end of the 19th century, scientists discovered phenomena in both the large (macro) and the small (micro) worlds that classical physics could not explain. The desire to resolve inconsistencies between observed phenomena and classical theory led to a revolution in physics, a shift in the original scientific paradigm: the development of quantum mechanics.
Richard Henry Dalitz, FRS was an Australian physicist known for his work in particle physics.
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Gerald Feinberg was a Columbia University physicist, futurist and popular science author. He spent a year as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and two years at the Brookhaven Laboratories. Feinberg went to Bronx High School of Science with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow and obtained his bachelor's and graduate degrees from Columbia University. His father was Yiddish poet and journalist Leon Feinberg. Among his students were Scott Dodelson, physicist at Carnegie Mellon University.
Mary Katharine Gaillard is an American theoretical physicist. Her focus is on particle physics. She is a professor of the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, and visiting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She was Berkeley's first tenured female physicist.
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe is a book by American physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg.
Don Lincoln is an American physicist, author, host of the YouTube channel Fermilab, and science communicator. He conducts research in particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and was an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, although he is no longer affiliated with the university. He received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994. In 1995, he was a co-discoverer of the top quark. He has co-authored hundreds of research papers, and more recently, was a member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.
Jagdish Mehra was an Indian–American physicist and historian of science.
In general relativity, the Oppenheimer–Snyder model is a solution to the Einstein field equations based on the Schwarzschild metric describing the collapse of an object of extreme mass into a black hole. It is named after physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder, who published it in 1939.